Sex Work

Sometime in the late 1980s I became aware of the term sex work. I was taken aback; it seemed too constrained and limiting. I understood its import—prostitution is work, it is the exchange of sex for money. Calling it sex work put prostitutes firmly in the realm of laborers who should be studied with dignity and respect. But why wasn't prostitution just work? I ignored the term; I was finishing a book about the history of prostitution in colonial Nairobi, and I didn't want to be distracted by terminology. By the time the book was published in 1990, sex work was in everyday use, and I regretted not saying why I objected to the term.By now, of course, being uneasy with the term sex work doubtless makes me a curmudgeon. But the fact remains that I would be much happier to have the word prostitution stripped of its mean-spirited and class-based connotations, to rescue it, in time-honored tradition, from the derision and condescension of the present. Sex work privileges the sexual aspect of any encounter in a way that's almost prurient; it does not allow for the location of the labor or the processes that inhere to it.In the world I studied, prostitution wasn't limited to sexual relations and it wasn't anything to be ashamed of. The women I studied in Nairobi were not social outcasts or barren women or any of the categories I had read that made African women go to towns. Many women "went with men"—as one said in Nairobi English—when they first came to the city, but what was noteworthy was that after these women found work as domestic servants or married or sold vegetables or cooked food on the street, many returned to prostitution because of the earning potential. It wasn't possible, one woman told me, that cleaning a Sikh's house would pay as much each month as thirty boyfriends would. In an aspirational sense, prostitution was not a survival strategy for these women; it was a way to prosper. Many women got rich: some earned enough to bail out the rural households that had not sustained them years before, while others earned enough to build houses in which they could live in one room and rent the others. Prostitution was about accumulation. I interviewed a woman whose house in a squatter settlement had been demolished in the late 1940s. She became a streetwalker and slept, rent free, on the verandah of a house owned by a friend. After two years she earned enough money to build another house.Obviously, a dispossessed landlord who prostitutes herself to earn money to build another house and a woman who wants more money than she could earn as a servant are doing what can easily be called sex work, but the term doesn't describe all of the kinds of labor these women performed. A few examples should explain what I mean. In the late 1970s I lived in an apartment building in Nairobi in which everyone but me was a prostitute. Early one morning a man came to my door asking for breakfast. I said I would not feed him and sent him on his way. Half an hour later one of my neighbors came to me and explained that the man had spent the night with her. She was sorry she did not have bread or tea for him, but if this happened again would I mind giving a man some food? Shortly after that, I interviewed an old woman who had been a prostitute in the 1930s. Many of her customers were white men, who brought gifts of foodstuffs and cloth. "If you saw my room," she told me, "you'd think you were in a store, but you weren't in a store, you were in the room of a prostitute." Several women I interviewed who were prostitutes in the late 1940s had rooms. They also had children, and chose to work as streetwalkers. When I asked why, they explained that children were loud and demanding in the morning "and that was not what a man visits a prostitute for." Do these vignettes add up to any single kind of labor? And if they do, can that labor be described by the term sex work? I don't think so. Take breakfast. It's ordinary hospitality, of course, but why make it an essential part of an overnight stay? Is hospitality sex work? Breakfast was an investment. Men would come back, I was repeatedly told, to clean rooms where they were given tea and bread and bathwater in the morning. What was on offer is not just the work of sex but an imitation of domestic life, or a fantasy thereof, in which women look after men.That insight did not come easily or quickly. It took me a long time to figure out precisely why I should have given that man breakfast that morning. The word these women used to describe their work and this kind of exchange was heshima, usually translated as "respect." Heshima described conduct that did not disrupt orderly social relations. For example, I interviewed a woman who in the late 1930s had inherited a house from an older woman whom she had befriended, in which the rooms were rented, often to prostitutes. In the township where I did much of my research, property could be inherited but not bought or sold. Women who owned houses often took the young women whom they mentored to district offices and declared them to be their heirs. The new landlord continued to see men, but she insisted that she never asked for money; she took whatever she was given. She did not want to risk a man making a scene or beating her. She said she did not fear male violence as much as she feared involving her neighbors. Her tenants were dependent on her in a tight housing market, but she did not want to disturb the house, or to have her tenants come to her rescue.It was only after I had left Kenya that these anecdotes took an analytical shape. Nairobi in the late 1970s had been the site of powerful Marxist analyses about agrarian society, in which social reproduction was incorporated perhaps too simply. There was great theoretical debate about unwaged work but not domestic work, which was, more often than not, subsumed in unproductive labor. As I began to write, it became clear not only that prostitutes understood how profitable housework could be, but that many colonial administrators knew full well that prostitutes offered more work than sex. They proposed housing in which there would be two rooms for eight men and one room for a prostitute, to provide "adequate provision" for workers' "needs."It's not that the word prostitution, however recoded, accurately describes fobbing off a customer's breakfast on an unsuspecting neighbor, but including such actions in the work of prostitutes reveals social worlds and the changing mores therein. The label sex work does not allow for histories of breakfast and violence, or much of anything but sex.